Oct. 31, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's funny because the simulation hypothesis, for the listeners that may not know, is basically the supposition that as computing power doubles every year, year and a half, according to what's known as Moore's Law, your computers get cheaper, they get more powerful, they get faster. | ||
| And that that extrapolation, there's no natural starting point. | ||
| I mean, when you made the first computer, whatever that for us is. | ||
| But could it not be that they get to so much power that they can simulate every single physical object in the universe? | ||
| And they can simulate all and if we're just material objects, our brains are just, you know, wet computers, but they're just computers. | ||
| They have neurons, they have carbon, Right. | ||
| and DNA and so forth, but why couldn't that be simulated in some great, vast supercomputer of the future | ||
| that doesn't exist yet, but we would be kind of like the Sim City or whatever. | ||
| We'd be in the Matrix, in essence. | ||
| Yeah, we'd be in the Matrix. | ||
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(dramatic music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a distinguished professor of physics | ||
| at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at UC San Diego, and author of the new book, | ||
| "Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner," | ||
| Brian Keating. | ||
| Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| You were my first big guest on my podcast, so it's nice to return the favor. | ||
| I know you've been looking forward to having a big guest like me on for a while. | ||
| I've wanted a man of science on for quite some time. | ||
| No, I've wanted to talk to you for a while on the show because I think this will be a little bit different than the shows that we normally do. | ||
| But framing one thing sort of politically just to jump us off, as a man of science and as a man that just wrote a book about how scientists approach science, what do you make of the state of science at the moment? | ||
| Science is getting pretty banged up these days. | ||
| Yeah, it's tough. | ||
| You know, I used to say I enjoy being an astronomer because there's no Republican asteroids, there's no Democratic comets, there's no, you know, it's apolitical, but it's become incredibly politicized, as you point out. | ||
| I always point out, Dave, you know, the word science in Latin, I know you're a scholar, so you'll know this, the word science means knowledge. | ||
| It doesn't mean wisdom. | ||
| So to expect wisdom from people that are knowledge junkies, Wikipedia has a lot of knowledge. | ||
| It doesn't have any wisdom. | ||
| You wouldn't want to trust your dog with it, right? | ||
| So I do believe that we're living in a fundamentally scientific technological age that kind of is worshipping scientists way more than I think we warrant. | ||
| As anyone who's ever known the famous joke about scientists, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? | ||
| Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. | ||
| And, you know, part of the goal of this book is to humanize scientists and to, you know, recognize that we're just human beings. | ||
| We have no special, you know, truth claims or wisdom claims than anyone else. | ||
| Does that sort of chasm between knowledge and wisdom sort of capture exactly the moment we're at in a way where it's like we hear things every day in the news? | ||
| Okay, there's a new study that says something. | ||
| That tells us something about knowledge to some degree, but then the wisdom of the policies that then we are told we have to follow often seems a little screwy, at least in my humble opinion. | ||
| Yeah, looking again, you know, if you look to somebody for wisdom, again, looking to Wikipedia for wisdom is not going to be too fruitful. | ||
| And yet we crave it because we worship at the altar of science in some way justifiably so. | ||
| It's led to life increases, child mortality rates plummeting, vaccines and so forth that are Just miraculous in any other way would be difficult to describe it. | ||
| Understanding the composition, evolution of the universe, you know, to a fraction of a percent. | ||
| Just astonishing. | ||
| And yet, we don't, as a laity, as the layperson, don't really have a good understanding of how science works. | ||
| So as the words of Arthur C. Clarke say, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | ||
| And some say it could be indistinguishable from a god. | ||
| And so I think there is a tendency, a desire to worship At the altar of science, and I think that's misplaced because we don't elect scientists as a population. | ||
| We elect politicians, a president, governors, etc. | ||
| We elect those people and they want to pass off, I think, some of their responsibility to the scientists who we don't elect and we wouldn't elect in any other capacity. | ||
| So last part on this specifically, but do you sense that sort of the reputation that science and scientists have gotten over the last year, where it's been so sort of battered and inconsistent and wear masks, don't wear masks, the vax is working, it's not working, booster shots, the whole thing. | ||
| Do you think it can recover in the next couple years? | ||
| Because right now, when they just trot out the next study, like at this point, I'm just like, this is just more nonsense. | ||
| I'm not saying I don't believe that the study was conducted, but what it will always lead to is just like, I can't listen to this stuff anymore. | ||
| Well, the biggest misconception is that science has ever settled. | ||
| I think the public has that to their dismay because Believing that science is settled is antithetical to science. | ||
| Think about it, Dave. | ||
| If Galileo came along and said, well, Aristotle was a scientist. | ||
| He's very smart. | ||
| I'll just accept that there are only four elements instead of, you know, 114, or that heavy things fall faster than light things. | ||
| All these things he could have verified, by the way, but he didn't actually go out and do that. | ||
| But Galileo would never have come up with the initial laws of relativity. | ||
| Same with Newton. | ||
| Einstein, because, well, Newton is a genius. | ||
| I can't outdo Newton, as he often looked up to him. | ||
| So therefore, as Richard Feynman, the great Nobel laureate of the 20th century, said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. | ||
| Otherwise, you'd have no motivation to ever modify, refine, and improve upon who or what came before you. | ||
| So I view that, and I view it to the detriment of science and scientists themselves. | ||
| You know, often people say, I'm no Einstein. | ||
| I can't understand it. | ||
| Well, guess what, Dave? | ||
| Einstein wasn't Einstein, you know, in the beginning of his life. | ||
| So I think the more that we kind of venerate without explaining how science is actually done, it harms our own practitioners of the craft of science that I am engaged in. | ||
| Yeah, and that really actually is what the book is about, because you talk about things like creativity, and human expression, and passion, all of these things that we don't really associate with scientists and their work specifically. | ||
| So let's just dive in. | ||
| So you have nine chapters here, each one going off a different scientist for a different reason. | ||
| I thought we could just spend a couple minutes on everybody, but you gotta leave some secrets here, otherwise people won't buy the book. | ||
| So a couple minutes on everybody. | ||
| I know how it works. | ||
| Chapter one is about Adam Ries, the stargazer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Adam is a contemporary of mine. | ||
| He's basically my age. | ||
| And back in, I think it was 2005, there was a worldwide competition to determine who was the greatest, you know, scientist under the age of 40. | ||
| And he and I entered it. | ||
| I came in first as the most promising scientist of all time, at least of that age. | ||
| And then Adam came in third. | ||
| And so later, you know, six years later, when he won the Nobel Prize, my older brother Kevin, who watches the show, he called to report on me and said, Brian, you won the battle. | ||
| But Adam won the war, brother. | ||
| You had the temporary reprieve. | ||
| So Adam is an incredibly curious individual. | ||
| He's very young. | ||
| And what is often said about the Nobel Prize, in fact, by Nobel laureate T.S. | ||
| Eliot, who won it for literature, he said, the Nobel is a ticket to your own funeral because no one ever does it after he wins it. | ||
| And Adam is a real counter example to that canard because he has gone on to, you know, great heights astronomically and otherwise. | ||
| Educational, mentorship, etc. | ||
| I think he best exemplifies the fact that, you know, Dave, I never thought I could be a professional astronomer, you know, growing up as we did on Long Island. | ||
| You know, I thought like, oh, someone's going to pay me to be an astronomer like they're going to pay me to be an ice cream taster. | ||
| Or, you know, or a wizard or something like that. | ||
| So, I really do look at him as the fulfillment of this dream that you can do it, you can achieve your passion, but passion alone is not enough. | ||
| You need to have insatiable curiosity. | ||
| I say passion is a spark, but the fuel is actually curiosity. | ||
| I have to tell you that growing up on Long Island, as you noted, in 1997, I think I told you this when I was on your podcast, I ate some pop brownies and then went to see the movie Contact by the great science communicator Carl Sagan, and I was basically tripping, and I'm sure you've seen the beginning of that movie many times, that spectacular panorama of the universe, and it blew my mind, and I ended up reading, I think I've read every one of Carl Sagan's books since then. | ||
| Well, he had passed away, I think, a few months before the movie came out. | ||
| But I had read all of his books. | ||
| So it is possible that someone from Long Island could stare into the stars and think something. | ||
| Yeah, I had his wife, his widow, Ann Druyan, who is a co-author on Contact, and his daughter on my podcast, Sasha Sagan, and he had something very pertinent to your book, you know, Don't Burn This Book. | ||
| He said, books, Dave, are magic. | ||
| They are the implantation of an author, long dead perhaps, although not for you or me, hopefully for many centuries to come, And the wisdom distilled, you know, per word, the price per word of wisdom in a book, Carl, you, hopefully me, these are really invaluable things. | ||
| And I think of these as hacks. | ||
| And these scholars that I profile in the book, they all make use of that and credit these great scientists and authors that came before. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing about the people that look into the distance and are always trying to figure out what's going on in the cosmos and the stars and everything else. | ||
| You'll hear now, oh, but we have so many problems here. | ||
| We shouldn't be funding any of these things. | ||
| And we know that a lot of it now, a lot of the exploration is being done privately, obviously, Elon Musk and some other people. | ||
| What do you make of that sort of general outlook? | ||
| Well, I think that, you know, separating out the space program and exploration of space from pure research. | ||
| So what I do is called, in one of the chapters by Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow, what I do, the origin evolution of the universe, cosmology, not to be confused with cosmetology, that you can tell I'm a master practitioner thereof, that we do, in his words, Useless ideas. | ||
| We basically pursue stuff that has no net benefit, at least so we think now. | ||
| And here's a good example. | ||
| The discovery of this emanation from the Big Bang that I study, called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, it's an all-pervasive glow of radio or microwaves. | ||
| It was discovered completely serendipitously by two radio astronomers in, of all places, New Jersey, Holmdel, New Jersey. | ||
| And they couldn't get rid of it, but the reason that they were so vital to even the communication technology that we're having now, they were working at Bell Laboratories. | ||
| Now, Bell Laboratories doesn't exist anymore, at least in that form, and that's much more detrimental, I think. | ||
| A place that was doing pure research, studying astronomy, how could that have any benefit? | ||
| And yet, David, who better to mine precious, weak radio signals that would then lead to cell phone technology Than those that study basic pure aka useless science like my fellow astronomers. | ||
| So the point is you can never really tell where serendipity will strike and where that will lead to technology that could scarcely have been imagined, you know, even a few decades earlier. | ||
| If I can harken back to Contact, which I think I'm going to do 20 times in this interview. | ||
| I mean, there's a great debate at one moment. | ||
| It's just a few minutes long between Ellie Arroway, who of course is Jodie Foster, and Tom Skerritt, who plays the head of the Science Foundation, and they're arguing about public funding versus whether the can we do pure research that has no sort of empirical | ||
| value necessarily that we know about at that moment, versus as he says, well, the people that are footing | ||
| the bill should get something out of this. | ||
| So that must be the endless battle between the bureaucrat, the scientist and the taxpayer. | ||
| Yeah, some people say the problem with science is that it often produces technology. | ||
| So, because it produces technology on occasion, we expect it to always produce it. | ||
| You know, it's like a great, you know, a great baserunner in baseball. | ||
| He may be a good sprinter, but that's not exactly their core competency. | ||
| So, yes, I think you have to do serendipitous research, and a great society like ours should do serendipitous, aka useless research. | ||
| Chapter 2 is Rainer Weiss, the Tinkerer. | ||
| So Rainer, or Ray Weiss, as we know and love him. | ||
| I think he's the oldest Laureate in the book, but he's so energetic. | ||
| He was responsible, in part, along with Barry Barish, who is a good friend of mine and wrote the foreword to the book. | ||
| The two of them and their colleague at Caltech, Kip Thorne, responsible for one of your favorite movies, Interstellar, I know. | ||
| It's up there, it's up there. | ||
| He was a physics consultant on it. | ||
| Anyway, these three gentlemen, along with a thousand other people, which I want to keep making the point, the science is not done by the one individual per chapter. | ||
| Oftentimes it's hundreds, even thousands in the case of Rainer Weiss. | ||
| And in this instance, they measured the faint reverberations of spacetime caused by sun times a 30. | ||
| So imagine a black hole 30 times the mass of the sun colliding together, smashing apart, and reverberating spacetime like a drumhead. | ||
| Oh, and by the way, it's 1.3 billion light years away, so these signals traveled for over a billion years to get to us. | ||
| Now, he credits some of these techniques that he used with his colleagues to detect this most minute fluctuations in the space-time continuum, literally, to his tinkering days as a young boy in the 30s and 40s having just escaped Germany with his father, who I believe is Jewish. | ||
| And he went to, you know, he was living in New York, and he would go to flea markets and pick up phonographs and vacuum tubes and just tinker around with them. | ||
| And in so doing, he kept not just the passion, again, I think passion is necessary, but not sufficient. | ||
| Curiosity is the fuel that will take you on the sustained journey, and that's what's kept him going. | ||
| And to me, Dave, what he told me, the advice that I take away the most, is that if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. | ||
| The dirty little secret, and please don't tell your friend Gavin Newsom this, please. | ||
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I am a- My good buddy, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I am a state employee. | ||
| He is my boss at some level, right? | ||
| So I'm a University of California professor, proud to be so. | ||
| I would do what I do for a free day. | ||
| It is so much fun. | ||
| I get to work with the brightest people, not just in California, around the world. | ||
| I get to talk to people at my outreach, my podcast, etc. | ||
| And I get to play around with technology paid for by you, the taxpayer, and you pay your taxes. | ||
| I've checked into that. | ||
| And so I view it as my obligation to give back free information to the public. | ||
| So I view that as my moral obligation. | ||
| It's not a business. | ||
| I don't make any money from it. | ||
| But I, like Ray, Ray Wise, find this great pleasure in reinventing what I do every so often in order to better communicate to the customer, which is the scientific taxpaying public. | ||
| Brian, I suddenly feel probably 2% happier about my California taxes. | ||
| You moved me about 2%. | ||
| All right, Arizona can wait. | ||
| Sheldon Glashow, the nucleator. | ||
| Shelley or Sheldon Glashow. | ||
| So he's the namesake inspiration for the Big Bang theories. | ||
| Sheldon, a young Sheldon. | ||
| He's a throwback to, he's an older guy and he really made his way doing something quite | ||
| unique. | ||
| My wife told me last night, she was reading it and yeah, I wrote another book before this. | ||
| I'm not convinced she read that book, Dave, but don't tell her I said so, although she's | ||
| a big fan of yours. | ||
| She'll be disappointed to know if you read that first book and not this. | ||
| Anyway, so she was reading and she's like, this is so appropriate because what he discovered, like the discovery that electricity and magnetism in technical physics terms are basically two different aspects of one underlying physical law. | ||
| And that's called electromagnetism. | ||
| So that you can turn a small current, can move a motor and spin a motor. | ||
| You could also spin that motor and generate a current. | ||
| That's in fact how currents and electrical power generation works. | ||
| So he discovered the analog of that unification in what's called the nuclear force. | ||
| It's not super important to get into, but it really delineated how these things that we perceive very different. | ||
| A magnet that you put in your refrigerator and a nine volt battery, they seem very different, but they are different manifestations of the same underlying coin. | ||
| He did so with his colleagues, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam, in the 60s and 70s, they discovered a similar feature of the nuclear force. | ||
| And my wife was reading, and she said, this is so interesting, because what one person perceives as a manifestation, say, pure electricity, another will perceive as magnetism. | ||
| Or as one person sees as electricity, will see as a nuclear force. | ||
| That's so interesting, because could you imagine, Dave, as you do often, and you talk about in your book, Can you argue the other person's side? | ||
| Can you do that? | ||
| Because otherwise, as you said, debate is kind of pointless. | ||
| Like, oh, Joe Biden did a great, you know, debating with Trump. | ||
| I'm going to vote for him now. | ||
| Is it diehard? | ||
| No, that never happened. | ||
| But if you can say, I see your perspective, and literally it is just as kosher, just as good as another person's perspective. | ||
| Well, then why not use that as a metaphor for how we could be maybe a little less polarized? | ||
| So I like that she got, I wasn't intending to say that, But it did come out from her interpretation of reading this chapter about how things that appear so different, Dave, are really the same manifestation of the underlying same phenomenon. | ||
| We actually could use a little bit more of that in politics. | ||
| I'm sure I could use a little bit more of it personally as well. | ||
| Then there's an interstitial. | ||
| Should we go into the interstitial? | ||
| Why'd you throw an interstitial into the book? | ||
| Did people have to get up and pee? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| I got paid by the word. | ||
| It's a short book, you know, and it's, it's not, there's no physics equations. | ||
| There's no homework. | ||
| Uh, you know, although you, you know, you being a master of quantum electrodynamics would have done quite well. | ||
| I had a custom illustrations and I should say, I have a podcast where I give away all these interviews. | ||
| You don't have to buy the, I hope you will. | ||
| I hope you'll get the audio or the, uh, the printed book. | ||
| But, um, but I actually wanted to, to really make this, this point clear. | ||
| There is no one way to do science, Dave. | ||
| Like you asked me in the beginning about science. | ||
| There is no science says or follow the science. | ||
| There's not even science. | ||
| Like science is essentially basically a, you know, a shortcut, a hack for us unraveling fundamental truths that never is perfect, is guaranteed to be imperfect. | ||
| And so some of that gives great comfort, because you can never get the right answer. | ||
| In other words, Newton was darn smart, and he was responsible for the laws that take Elon Musk's SpaceX to the stars and took the Apollo astronauts to the surface of the moon. | ||
| But if you want to go and understand the properties of a black hole, his work will not do, and you need Einstein. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| Einstein's not the right answer either. | ||
| We're going to find some subsequent improvement to it, maybe quantum gravity, which we'll, you know, we'll get it. | ||
| We have a 10-part Learning Company series, you and I on that, so we can refer people to that lecture series. | ||
| But that's not quantum gravity. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| That won't be the final answer either. | ||
| So I want to show that there's different approaches to arriving at truth. | ||
| You can manifest them. | ||
| I was talking to Tom Bilyeu, who lives in LA, is a famous podcaster. | ||
| Great guy, had him on the show. | ||
| I was actually at his laboratory and he told me his way that he works through, you know, when he was at Quest Nutrition and he was developing these really tasty but nutritious bars, protein bars, whatever. | ||
| And the scientific method that he was using and how he also applies it to venture capital or to now he's into NFTs and Bitcoin and stuff like that. | ||
| But it's a it's a process of thinking guaranteed to be imperfect, but better than all the rest. | ||
| So I want to outline how you can do it. | ||
| My avatar is a is a car salesman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. | ||
| It's not a scientist, it's not written for science majors, and that you can apply methodological thinking, testing hypotheses, listening to your critics, achieving consensus, and realizing, in surreptitiously perhaps, that when you hear things like 99% of scientists agree, you should be very concerned. | ||
| You should be very concerned. | ||
| We hear an awful lot about that these days, on many fronts actually, not just COVID, climate change, all sorts of things. | ||
| Carl Wyman, the teacher's teacher. | ||
| Yeah, so for a long time I had been kind of an acolyte of Malcolm Gladwell, who, you know, popularized, he didn't invent this concept, but the so-called 10,000-hour rule. | ||
| So I did a little math. | ||
| You've been doing podcasting, The Rubin Report, you've been on, you know, 2000s, early 2000s, you've had way more than 10,000 hours. | ||
| But the study that Gladwell and Anders Ericsson popularized was that basically the best pilots have 10,000 hours of flight experience. | ||
| Bill Gates had like 10,000 hours of computer programming by the time Microsoft. | ||
| Steve Jobs had 10,000. | ||
| So he'd done, it's basically, it's not a scientific analysis. | ||
| It's really correlative. | ||
| And I wanted to know, well, we as professors, we never really get taught how to teach. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
| You may be interested in teaching and pedagogy, but we have so many other obligations in addition to teaching, research, funding. | ||
| Bureaucracy, you know, and getting through, you know, all the different hoops of working, not just at a state university, any university. | ||
| And then teaching is on there and it's a big priority. | ||
| It's the reason we get into it, but oftentimes we're distracted by other quotidian demands. | ||
| And in this case, I wanted to kind of demystify, how should we be teaching? | ||
| Because I don't know if you know it, but the way that we teach with like some dude scraping a piece of rock on another piece of rock, that is almost exactly a thousand year old model. | ||
| It's not been disrupted since the year 1080 in Bologna, Italy, when the first modern university incarnation came along, where you'd have some guy, you know, and but the only thing that's better now is that back then, Dave, the students could go on strike and the professors would not get paid. | ||
| So thank God we have tenure. | ||
| I mean that. | ||
| Yeah, that's barbaric. | ||
| That is a barbaric practice. | ||
| But other than that, what has changed? | ||
| So I got into all sorts of things. | ||
| Could we have an artificial intelligent professor? | ||
| Could we alleviate some of the burden but also free up the minds and the time of the student to do it? | ||
| And he likened our current practice of teaching to the medical practices of the 18th and 17th century with leeches and bloodletting. | ||
| He said we're at a primitive state and we need to go beyond that. | ||
| He has some models to do it. | ||
| I don't think any of them are foolproof. | ||
| But the key takeaway I took, Dave, is that to be a good teacher, you have to be a student of teaching. | ||
| And I pointed out in the book that the word scientist in the Russian language means someone who was taught. | ||
| To me, that conveys an obligation. | ||
| You both have to be a good student, but you have to be a good teacher to pay it forward to the next generation. | ||
| And so I think he exemplifies that to me and really made me want to double down and be a better teacher by studying teaching. | ||
| And that's not something I really have that much time to do, but I find a little bit of effort goes a long way with it. | ||
| In anybody's field, the way to learn something, to be a better salesman, to be a better podcaster. | ||
| I think I asked you when you came out, I was like, how do you know, Dave, when you're giving a good interview, when you're doing a good job as an interviewer? | ||
| Like there's no, like you don't have a grader anymore, but you must study it and you must listen to it. | ||
| And even if that means studying with people that maybe you don't agree with all the time. | ||
| You can learn a lot, and that's part of the humble nature that I think it takes to be a good student and ergo a good teacher. | ||
| It's interesting, because as you're talking about that, I'm thinking of all of the videos that we see on Twitter every day where a student will take a video of a teacher just doing everything wrong, either the way they're trying to brainwash them or yell at them and whatever, and it's just like, man, there is so much broken in our education system altogether, but that's for a different show. | ||
| Roger Penrose, the singular mind. | ||
| Yeah, so Roger just celebrated his 90th birthday, and he made appearance in Theory of Everything the movie With Eddie Redmayne, I guess and that was about Stephen Hawking who is his you know famous late great friend and collaborator and colleague at Cambridge while Roger was at Oxford. | ||
| So Roger came up with really whimsical, almost whimsical drawings and cartoons and schematics that demonstrate what would happen to your watch, Dave, as you get close to a black hole. | ||
| What would happen as you go beyond what's called the event horizon? | ||
| How would things proceed? | ||
| How would your future look? | ||
| How would you look to someone on the outside world? | ||
| And he did this very intuitively through a series of cartoons almost. | ||
| And it's in his tradition as an artist, he's really a mathematician and he's invented these | ||
| wonderful things that are evocative of Escher drawings with staircases that just seem to | ||
| keep going up or these fishes that tile this whole sphere and so forth. | ||
| And he thinks geometrically. | ||
| He thinks artistically. | ||
| His dad was an artist. | ||
| And many of these men, unfortunately, I tried to get the two living Nobel Prize laureates in physics that are female. | ||
| They both rejected me, so that took me back to high school, getting rejected by brilliant women. | ||
| But for various reasons, they weren't able to do it. | ||
| But I'm hoping, hope springs eternal, and I'll keep going. | ||
| I hope there's more female laureates, obviously. | ||
| I have daughters myself, and maybe someday they could be among them. | ||
| The point being, when I asked them, the most common thing I got was a father or a teacher. | ||
| And I took that very seriously. | ||
| Again, that you can be a father, even if you don't have biological children. | ||
| These men are ideological fathers in some sense to millions of people around the world. | ||
| And yet they haven't written their biography. | ||
| I mean, none of them have a biography. | ||
| Which is kind of interesting. | ||
| So I wanted to do that as a service such that maybe somebody could be influenced by them the way that they've influenced me through their technical writing, but you might not know that actually they're really good with dealing with like, you know, vengeful competitors and things like that. | ||
| That is actually what we deal with day-to-day, isn't it? | ||
| It's not like stroking my non-existent beard, you know, thinking about contemplating the cosmos. | ||
| I get to do that on occasion, but not that often. | ||
| Mostly it's dealing with troublesome, you know, suppliers and vendors and getting equipment to the site and the students having a problem. | ||
| And that's, you know, I want to go beyond that. | ||
| And I think having mentors and avuncular figures like I do in the book, I think I'm hoping that that will influence people to see the human side of science. | ||
| Right, and also of course doing some of this through art and technology can awaken people in a way that just the guy at the chalkboard can't do. | ||
| How did Interstellar do in that regard when they were going over that event horizon, right? | ||
| Because they had to drop the robot, I forget what he was called, TARS, had to be dropped in. | ||
| There's a lot of imagery there about light can't escape from the other side and all of that stuff. | ||
| How'd they do? | ||
| How'd they do? | ||
| So that was all influenced by Sir Roger Penrose, who influenced Kip Thorne, who is another laureate that I hope to get on the show, who was responsible for winning the Nobel Prize along with colleagues for the LIGO experiment, Ray Weiss, we already talked about. | ||
| And so, you can take a lot of what I call physicist license, because these things are not approachable. | ||
| I was talking on a podcast earlier this week with a biology professor and she was talking about, you know, and I was like, don't, don't talk to me about that because, um, you know, I'm so bad at biology that when I dissected a frog in high school, the frog lived, you know, it was, I just couldn't do it. | ||
| But in astronomy, so in other words, you can't do an experiment. | ||
| I can't say, Hmm, Dave, what if, uh, the cosmos had twice as much dark matter? | ||
| Oh, let me just, you know, I'm God and no, no, you can't do that. | ||
| Whereas you can have a control, you know, and a variable and do stuff in biology. | ||
| So astronomy and in particular cosmology is very hard. | ||
| But what you can do is take a lot of artistic license. | ||
| The fact that you can't go near a black hole, you can't go back to the Big Bang, | ||
| means that you can do a lot with simulations that really let the imagination run wild. | ||
| I think that was your way of saying that the interstellar scene was pretty cool | ||
| as he's going through his thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, what happened in the first, I never saw it. | ||
| I was going to the, I had to go to the Mexican border to get like a global entry card a few years back. | ||
| I hadn't seen interstellar. | ||
| And the guy in front of me was a professor also at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. | ||
| And I was like, holy crap, they're gonna think like it's a conspiracy. | ||
| Like all these professors are coming to the border to get their passport or to get their whatever. | ||
| And the guy said to me, at first, I heard him ask the guy in front of me some questions. | ||
| Then he said to me, like, well, oh, you're an astrophysicist? | ||
| You think you're smarter than me? | ||
| Like, you got a pretty big gun over there. | ||
| I better be careful. | ||
| And I said, well, you know, I hadn't seen it, Dave, so I had to like think fast on my feet. | ||
| And I said, well, you know, interstellar. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| You know, he asked me, what do you think about interstellar? | ||
| You're so smart. | ||
| Well, the gravitational space time continuum can be warped by four dimensional, but not in a manifest state. | ||
| And I just BS my way out of it. | ||
| But luckily I only spent three nights in the Tijuana prison. | ||
| I've been doing that my whole life with Star Wars, so you're good to go. | ||
| Duncan Haldane, the alchemist. | ||
| Yeah, so this is a guy who, along with colleagues, invented a theoretical type of matter, a phase of matter not known to exist, and purely intellectually. | ||
| And it's so weird, Dave. | ||
| We exist in three dimensions. | ||
| We can go up, down, backwards, forwards, left, right. | ||
| But he envisioned a two-dimensional world. | ||
| Very different with time proceeding, but also confined to two dimensions, like an ant would feel, you know, bulbous and curvy, right? | ||
| But a flat surface. | ||
| And then he asked, well, what would matter behave like then? | ||
| And he speculated and he came up with this new type of matter and it would have certain properties and it would behave in an interesting way. | ||
| But everyone thought it was purely mathematical until experimental physicists devised ways | ||
| to actually simulate a two-dimensional world by basically printing on a very special media | ||
| types of exotic phenomena. | ||
| And then they found that these objects behave differently in two dimensions and three dimensions. | ||
| So he really conceived in his mind of a new element, of a new type of matter. | ||
| And I found that very interesting. | ||
| And so I call him the alchemist. | ||
| Yeah, he's a very clever alchemist. | ||
| Of course, for people that thought they could turn ordinary base metals into gold. | ||
| And actually, some of the greatest minds in history, like Isaac Newton, did that. | ||
| And that's actually part of what you said in the very beginning. | ||
| Because actually, the hard sciences, they have pretty shaky, you know, past histories. | ||
| So chemistry evolved from, essentially, from alchemy. | ||
| Astronomy evolved from astrology. | ||
| And obviously medicine evolved from, you know, leeches and bloodletting like we talked about earlier. | ||
| So, you know, I think we have a tendency to want to kind of glorify, you know, oh, the scientific method, and there is no scientific method. | ||
| That's, you know, full stop. | ||
| There are ways to methodologically approach scientific or knowledge-based questions. | ||
| And I think this way of like coming up with a new form of matter purely in the human brain, I think that's just so fascinating. | ||
| How long did it take before he met the guy that was able to actually replicate it in the real world? | ||
| Years, years. | ||
| And it's funny because in the interview, at the end, he starts talking about, well, I don't think this is gonna make a new iPhone. | ||
| Like, it's not gonna improve your life. | ||
| But I was like, the history of science tells us otherwise. | ||
| Like, there's a very good chance that, you know. | ||
| Like, if you ask these guys who discovered this hiss of microwaves back in the 60s, would we, you know, be able to watch, you know... I always say, my grandmother, Dave, you know, she grew up in the shtetls and, you know, seeing horse and buggies, and she grew up to see human beings, men, walking on the surface of TikTok. | ||
| And, you know, how wonderful is that? | ||
| So I'm like telling this guy, Haldane, don't, you know, don't underestimate what the human mind can do with enough time. | ||
| Frank Wilczek, a beautiful mind. | ||
| Yes, Frank Wilczek, he is a professor at MIT now, and when he was in his early 20s, Dave, he came up with an idea so brilliant, along with his colleagues, that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize in 1974. | ||
| He was told he's the wonder kid of science. | ||
| He is going to guarantee to make a trip to Stockholm. | ||
| There's just one catch. | ||
| There's about 20 other guys in front of you that have to get their Nobel Prizes almost in order for you to have the validation and the verification that is necessary in the scientific method to get consensus around this physics idea. | ||
| Now, Dave, I imagine if I told you you're going to win the lottery next week, next year, you'd be pretty happy. | ||
| If I told you you're going to win in 30 years, what would go through your mind? | ||
| I mean, I think that I'd be thinking about, hmm, I've got to stay alive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've got to come back on the burgers. | |
| But imagine the terror and the pressure. | ||
| And so many of them, I think, you know, there was such a long delay between the work that won them the prize eventually and the actual awarding of the prize on December 10th every year in Stockholm, Sweden. | ||
| And I think that that is a lesson in resiliency and perseverance, because he also didn't rest on that. | ||
| Like, I might just say, okay, cool, put me in the coma, you know, put on the feeding tube, this Woody Allen and sleeper outfit, and wake me up when Stockholm calls. | ||
| But no, he didn't. | ||
| He went on to invent Or create many, many new things. | ||
| And he's an inspiration in many ways from that. | ||
| He's also a great writer. | ||
| He writes for the Wall Street Journal, science column for the Wall Street Journal, which is, you know, it's not technical at all. | ||
| And it's just, he's an incredible intellect. | ||
| Speaking of Woody Allen and Sleeper, do we still not have the cryo-sleep things? | ||
| I mean, they were in Interstellar 2, they're in all the Alien movies. | ||
| Do those things exist? | ||
| Where are we at with those things? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Every time I go down to my biology lab, colleagues are always asleep or, you know, dissecting frogs. | ||
| If you had access to those many chemicals and drugs, Dave, what would you be doing? | ||
| You would put yourself in a bag in some hot water, usually, and then they get you. | ||
| It was in The Martian, too. | ||
| One of those brownies that you still have left over from 1997. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I wish I had those. | ||
| John Mather, the collaborator. | ||
| Yeah, John is an incredible guy who also is kind of a wunderkind and did a tremendous amount of work. | ||
| He is the stereotypical, although he's not a professor, he's a stereotypical professor, just super smart, knows everything about the field, and has contributed to many, many great discoveries, and is about to be the chief scientist behind this new space telescope that's going to be launched in December, hopefully, 20-year delay. It's one of the most expensive projects NASA's | ||
| ever done. And it's a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revealed more | ||
| wonders and mysteries of the cosmos than any other project. And so he discovered, not serendipitously, | ||
| so he's an example of a different type of scientific discovery, which is that you | ||
| make an extremely precise measurement of a known quantity, something that we knew existed, this | ||
| microwave background radiation that I study, comes in all directions, originally | ||
| discovered in New Jersey, but he made the most exquisite measurement ever that put the nail in the coffin | ||
| of the any other alternatives that could plausibly be said to be | ||
| responsible for the appearance of our universe. | ||
| Namely, there are people that believed up until then in the early '90s that the universe | ||
| could have existed forever in what's called a steady state. | ||
| And the measurements that he did for technical reasons really destroyed all hope for those | ||
| who believed in an alternative to what we now call the Big Bang initiation of the universe. | ||
| So he is this really quintessential workman-like, studious, bookish, very, very bright, and | ||
| He just keeps going. | ||
| And again, these guys could all retire and be, you know, super famous and do whatever they want to do. | ||
| And yet he's working super hard on this next great space telescope, the dividends of which may not come for decades or more. | ||
| How does it go for a guy like that when he sort of puts that final nail, as you put it, and it sort of blows up what many in his field think about something? | ||
| I suspect there's probably a lot of resentment, there's probably a lot of denial, but slowly, kind of, people come along, usually? | ||
| Yeah, well, that's what's so interesting. | ||
| In that chapter, he talks about the importance of listening to your critics, but not too much. | ||
| And I kind of summarize this as a trait in my students. | ||
| I say, you have to be humble. | ||
| Nobody likes someone who's not humble. | ||
| And we'll talk about imposter syndrome and stuff in a little bit, I'm sure. | ||
| But you need humility, but you need swagger too. | ||
| You need the swagger to know that you're doing a good job, that you are competent. | ||
| You can't just go, oh, I'm timid, I'm humble, I can't do anything. | ||
| And in his case, There were these really vociferous calls that, you know, that the Big Bang is wrong and it's actually just a product of, you know, of religious scientists, if you can believe such a thing. | ||
| And this impulse that human beings have to believe in Genesis 1-1, etc, etc. | ||
| And in the end, he said, you can listen to those people, you can respect their scientific contributions, but you shouldn't listen so much that you really undermine your own confidence. | ||
| So it's listening to your critics, not necessarily letting their comments go to your heart, but maybe ingesting them into your mind, processing them analytically, and saying, is there a way, and I translated this and we talked about this before, can you steel man your critic? | ||
| And can you build up his or her counter-argument to your pet theory or pet experiment? | ||
| And if you can't, it's not a guarantee that you're wrong. | ||
| You may be right, and they may be just a blundering idiot who just believes in some stupid model. | ||
| But in the case where you can actually reproduce their arguments, it makes your case that much more strong. | ||
| And I think that's a trait I want to imbue and, you know, other people to take to heart, no matter what their field. | ||
| And I think he exemplifies that. | ||
| I suspect that goes far better in the laboratories that you people work in rather than the Twitterscape. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I don't need to run an experiment on that. | ||
| My life has been a living experiment of that. | ||
| We've got one more, and then if you don't mind, I'm going to throw in my own scientist. | ||
| I have not planned anything in advance with you, but I'm going to throw in someone that has influenced me tremendously. | ||
| But the last one, number nine, Barry Barish, the avuncular avatar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Barry kind of represents the physicist that I want to be, and the avatar aspect of that, and avuncular, because he is just such a warm, gracious individual. | ||
| So Barry really, in some ways, is responsible for this book's existence, because it was during the recording of this episode with him on my podcast, Into the Impossible, that he said something that was kind of interesting and provocative to me, and then I went further Learning the Rubinik skills that I've learned from you, and I went deeper. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| He said to me, Dave, and it blew me away. | ||
| I said, when you were young, were you like this stereotypical brilliant kid in math? | ||
| And he's like, no, I was never, you know, I was good. | ||
| I was hard worker. | ||
| I was smart. | ||
| But, you know, he grew up in Oklahoma and then later moved to LA and so forth. | ||
| And then he was just like persistent. | ||
| He always wanted to do a certain type of work called particle physics. | ||
| And, um, you know, but he was never under this impression that he was, you know, great. | ||
| And I said, did you ever have the imposter syndrome? | ||
| You know, when you were at UC Berkeley working for these famous Nobel laureate, you know, physicists, did you ever feel like you weren't good enough? | ||
| He goes, what do you mean? | ||
| Did I, I still feel the imposter syndrome. | ||
| I was like, what are you talking about? | ||
| He said, I feel it worse than ever. | ||
| And I said, you got to explain what are you talking about? | ||
| And he said, when you win a Nobel prize, You go to Stockholm. | ||
| You meet the king. | ||
| You bend down and he puts this golden, gilded, engraved image of Alfred Nobel on your neck. | ||
| And you get a check for some fraction or 100% of a million dollar payout. | ||
| And you get this portrait, this really beautiful portrait. | ||
| I tried to reproduce the portraits of a really nice work of an artist in this book. | ||
| I think he did a wonderful job. | ||
| And then you have to sign this ledger that says, yes, I received my Nobel Prize and all the accoutrements and delicacies therein. | ||
| And he said, when I did that, I'm a very curious person. | ||
| I couldn't resist who signed it before me. | ||
| So he turned back the pages, he saw Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, and he saw Albert Einstein. | ||
| And he said, Dave, and the hair still stands up, he said, I'm not worthy. | ||
| I am not Einstein. | ||
| I am not good enough to be there. | ||
| And it made me feel completely inadequate, completely not up to the task. | ||
| And now I'm in the same league as Einstein. | ||
| I do not deserve it. | ||
| And I said, thinking quickly, I said, Barry, guess what? | ||
| You know who also had the imposter syndrome? | ||
| Albert Einstein. | ||
| Because Albert Einstein was in awe and wholly inadequate before Isaac Newton. | ||
| And he felt, Isaac Newton, Dave, can you imagine if Einstein were tweeting today? | ||
| He said the following, he said, Isaac Newton revolutionized not only science, but Western culture, Western civilization. | ||
| He canceled immediately. | ||
| He said, Newton, had more influence on civilization, not just science, than any human before or since, meaning including Albert Einstein, who was writing this about Newton. | ||
| And I said, but wait, Barry, it doesn't stop there. | ||
| Isaac Newton had the severe case of the imposter syndrome. | ||
| So what do you mean? | ||
| I said, he felt completely inadequate before his idol, not a scientist, but Jesus Christ. | ||
| In fact, Newton said his highest accomplishment in life is that he died a virgin, like Jesus Christ. | ||
| He wanted to emulate Christ in every way. | ||
| So, I think it's very fascinating. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| You know, I don't know, maybe Jesus didn't have enough. | ||
| Maybe Jesus didn't feel the imposter syndrome, but he was pretty humble, and I think he was a pretty brilliant human being. | ||
| Or God, depending on your perspective, right? | ||
| So, I think we all can learn this lesson. | ||
| Because if you think that you're the greatest person and you have these great contributions and you have like, I won the Nobel Prize, like there are guys, I'm not going to say who, but there are people in the book who said, I don't have the imposter syndrome. | ||
| I deserve this freaking thing, you know, like Flavor Flav with a huge medallion around his neck. | ||
| But they, they feel like they deserve, but not all of them. | ||
| And I think that it was a dichotomy that I wasn't suspecting. | ||
| It was a dichotomy that you need to have, like I said, humility and swagger, but you need to be very careful about it because the imposter syndrome is born out of insecurity, and people that are arrogant and unpleasant, they're also insecure, right? | ||
| The old joke, and you know this from your dog, You know, the smallest dog barks the loudest, right? | ||
| That's the thing, right? | ||
| You talk to Jocko on your podcast, Jocko's not like, oh I'm gonna kick your, you know, he's just like, whatever man, like I'll run away, like I'll put on my running shoes and get out of there. | ||
| So I think that's really interesting because it's very rare that the opposite Two different traits in diametric opposition come from the same source. | ||
| Insecurity is responsible for imposter syndrome and for the arrogance that many non-humble people feel. | ||
| So, I felt it was important to distill this, and who better to learn it from than someone who's achieved and gotten into the promised land? | ||
| Of my field is the Nobel Prize. | ||
| There's no higher thing in all of science, maybe even all of culture, civilization and society than the Nobel Prize. | ||
| And so I felt these people, in particular Barry, and I was so honored that he wrote the foreword to the book as well. | ||
| That was really a great honor that I do not feel worthy of. | ||
| Brian, that was a beautiful ending to the interview in a normal situation, but I feel that I must ask you about one other scientist who was hugely influential, I believe at Queens College, and I think maybe he was a nuclear scientist, Dr. Otto Octavius. | ||
| Do you know of him? | ||
| No, I do not know of him personally. | ||
| Is he a Nobel-caliber scientist? | ||
| Doc Ock from Spider-Man. | ||
| Doc Ock! | ||
| He was doing something with nuclear power with the arms and then he got them fused to his back and then the little inhibitor chip blew up. | ||
| Next thing you know, he's working with Mysterio and the rest of the guys. | ||
| Spider-Man was very prescient because he also presaged the existence of the multiverse in the Spider-Verse, right? | ||
| And now we're all entering the multiverse. | ||
| That's the new thing. | ||
| You know, there's this rumor going around now that Facebook's actually gonna rename itself the multiverse or something. | ||
| Have you heard about this? | ||
| No, I have not heard about that. | ||
| Yeah, no, that makes me wanna take a Sabbath from all social media networks, but except to subscribe to your feed. | ||
| I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I actually have one more for you, which is, are we living in a simulation? | ||
| How's that for a final question? | ||
| Well, usually, Dave, people preface this, I have a simple question. | ||
| How do you reconcile believing in God with the existence of the Big Bang? | ||
| That would be a simple question, the simulation. | ||
| So what's so interesting about the simulation is that it actually has a lot of bases in both classical philosophy, kind of the Pascal's wager, kind of the Descartesian cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. | ||
| People don't realize that that was Predicated. | ||
| So Descartes said, how do I know I'm not just a brain in a vat? | ||
| Basically, that was their simulation of the time. | ||
| And he said, I know I am not, because I think, therefore I am. | ||
| But there is a predicate sentence, which was that God created him. | ||
| So in other words, actually, Descartes can't answer that question without God. | ||
| And it's funny, because the simulation hypothesis, for the listeners that may not know, is basically the supposition that as computing power doubles every year, year and a half, according to what's known as Moore's Law, your computers get cheaper, they get more powerful, they get faster. | ||
| And that that extrapolation, there's no natural starting point. | ||
| I mean, when you made the first computer, whatever that for us is. | ||
| But could it not be that they get to so much power that they can simulate every single physical object in the universe? | ||
| And they can simulate all and if we're just material objects, our brains are just, you know, wet computers, but they're just computers. | ||
| They have neurons, they have carbon, Right. | ||
| and DNA and so forth, but why couldn't that be simulated in some great vast supercomputer of the future | ||
| that doesn't exist yet, but we would be kind of like, you know, the Sim City or whatever. | ||
| We'd be in the matrix in essence. | ||
| Yeah, we'd be in the matrix. | ||
| So there are a lot of ways to actually test for that and actually probe for it. | ||
| There's no evidence that we are in a simulation, that we do live in a matrix. | ||
| For one question, it could have this infinite regress of possibilities. | ||
| You could say to me, we are a simulation. | ||
| I could say, well, whoever made that simulation, they're a simulation. | ||
| And whoever made that simulation. | ||
| And so you would have to have an infinite, not just a large amount of computing, you need an infinite amount of computing power. | ||
| And there would be certain glitches. | ||
| And, you know, the first thing I would want to know is why are there so many damn Kardashians? | ||
| Like, why do we need so many Kardashians in this simulation? | ||
| But I think it stems from, you know, both extrapolating the computing power, which actually isn't growing in terms of like the number of transistors that's growing. | ||
| But because the computers get better and better, more people want to use them, Dave. | ||
| And actually they start to slow down because their demands are so much higher. | ||
| They're victims of their own success. | ||
| And there's no reason to think that won't happen either with quantum computers or whatever. | ||
| And the last thing I want to say is that, imagine if there is a simulation, and there is some simulator, and let's say it's not infinite, there's just one, what ethical responsibilities does that simulation have? | ||
| And, you know, to the things that it's simulating, because we feel pain. | ||
| You know, you could imagine we can create artificial intelligence, AI, and that could feel pain. | ||
| You could make it so that if it does something you don't like, you unplug it or you pop a transistor or you, you know, nail a capacitor in the middle of the circuit board. | ||
| And it could feel pain. | ||
| But can it feel the kinds of inspiration, the kinds of, you know, the ghost in the machine? | ||
| We don't know yet if that's possible. | ||
| I happen to be a pessimist. | ||
| I don't think that artificial intelligence will take over the universe or even create new physics or new art or things like that. | ||
| That's categorically different from what we're seeing now. | ||
| In other words, I like to say, Humans can be beaten by computers at chess, but can a computer invent a game of chess? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Brian, you are an excellent science communicator. | ||
| I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| It was a little different from our day-to-day political lunacy, but I suspect my audience will enjoy it as well. | ||
| We're gonna link to the book right down below, and I've enjoyed this, but for the record, not a huge fan of your boss, Gavin Newsom, just in case anyone was unclear on their feelings on that. | ||
| Well, we'll see if you get tenure after that. | ||
| Thanks, Brian. | ||
| I'll put in a good word, but we'll see. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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